[hasperdi]

I don't think that's a realistic suggestion as as the quantity of applications are huge who are going to spend time reviewing them one by one. And and even then it's not realistic to expect that that undesirable things can be detected as these things can be hidden externally for instance or obfuscated

[lukeschlather]

F-Droid exists and they have a much better track record than Google. I'm not actually serious, I just think if there's a single app repo that should be allowed to install apps without a scary 24h verification cooldown, it's Google's proprietary closed-source app store that needs the scary process, not F-Droid.

[silver_sun]

Users don't have to wait 24 hours because Google Play store already has registered developers. Scammers can be held liable when Google knows who the developer of the malicious app is.

[xp84]

Really though? Who is in jail right now for Play Store malware offenses? Or are we just talking about some random person in China or Russia who signed up with a prepaid card and fake information had their Google account shut off eventually.

[silver_sun]

I'll give you that, enforcement of the rules can sometimes fail. But scamming & malware is a global industry, definitely not limited to state-funded actors in those two countries (which is what I think you're referring to).

[collabs]

I think compared to the alternatives, this is the best answer.

Even if you are a bank or whatever, you shouldn't store global secrets on the app itself, obfuscated or not. And once you have good engineering practices to not store global secrets (user specific secrets is ok), then there is no reason why the source code couldn't be public.